 It's the last presentation of the day, and I like you. Just want it to be over so we can all go and have drinks. So I will get on with it. Now I'm not the best speaker in the world, but I do have bribes. So if you take a photo and share on social media today using hashtag WCBNE and hashtag Katoon, you can win a copy of my book or a day curl or a pen. I've got bribes basically. So share my stuff and there's stuff in for it. And then everyone will think I'm a really good speaker and book me for other events. It's worked the last two years. I don't see why it should stop now. So let's do the thing where we make people put their hand up in the air, shall we? Because no one else has done that today. Hands up if you've got a blog on your WordPress site. Hands up if you blog once a year. Hands up if you blog once a month. Hands up if you blog once a week. Hands up if you haven't posted a blog in a very long time. Yes, I thought so. And one of the main reasons that people don't post blog posts is because they feel like no one reads them. Let's be honest, writing a blog post takes quite a long time. And then when we post it and we wait for the comments to come in and there's no comments and no one shares it on social media, it's a little bit depressing. So we think, well, let's not do that again. So today I'm going to give you, well, I think it might be 10, might be 12 reasons why no one is reading your blog posts and just to be slightly helpful how to change that as well. OK, so for those of you who don't know who I am, everything Nick said was pretty much wrong. I am a speaker, I guess I'm an entrepreneur but that sounds such a wanky thing to say that I don't like saying it. I have two core businesses, the recipe for SEO success, where I teach small business owners, e-commerce stores, bloggers, copywriters, marketers, et cetera, how to win love from the Google beast without sacrificing their soul. My other business is the clever copywriting school where I teach copywriters how to have successful, happy, healthy lives. So we've got some stragglers coming in, come on stragglers, come on, get on this desk. And also I began life as a copywriter and I built my own site in WordPress. I've actually built seven sites in WordPress. I don't know why I have seven websites, it's a lot of work, but I'm a huge WordPress fan. I think this is my six or seven WordPress speaking. So yeah, I'm a big fan. So this is a slide that I meant to show while I was saying all of that but I forgot to show it. So I'll just leave this here for a couple of seconds for you to look at. I'm joking. I will move on. Now there's a prize here. Can anyone put their hand up and shout really loudly how many blog posts they think I've posted every single day on the interwebs? Anyone want to put their hand up? 11 did you say? Sorry? 11, it's slightly more. 5 billion? Okay, slightly less. Anyone else want to? No? One, two? Just all shout numbers, come on. It's four million every single day. But I found that out by Googling it. I guess if I Googled it again I'd probably get a different figure. Yeah, there you go. You saw my slides earlier. This is what you get from cheating. Four billion blog posts every single day, which just sounds insane. The percentage of those that are probably read is substantially less. Shall I just stop for a minute and let people come in? It's you, you're to blame. It's all your fault. Get out. What should we do while we're waiting? Sing a song. Do a quiz. What does SEO stand for? There we go. Whoever said that would be won a prize. Come and claim it at the end. When everyone comes through the door, let's guess what their name is. Next person. That's Susan. Next person. Jeanine Mary. No idea. There's no more. I think we're done. Really? Can someone go and gather them with a prod? We'll keep on going. Four million blog posts. The point here is then how on earth do you get your blog post read? With all that noise. There's a lot of noise in this room at the moment as well. Be quiet, Shush. See I'm getting bossy now. How do you get your blog post read? And not just by anybody, but by customers who want to buy from you. I think you saw Will's presentation earlier. The whole point of us being out there and content marketing is so that people buy our services, buy our stuff. There's no point blogging for the sake of blogging, which is what I think a lot of people do and what I'm going to talk about today. So, blogging is not always the right answer. When I started my business, which is about 11 years ago, life was a lot easier. Google is easier. You could just post a few things and you are top of the rankings. Everyone thinks I'm amazing. I ranked number one for copywriter, not SEO. But there you go. It's still good. I'll take it. Blogging these days, we have so many more options. We have Facebook live, we have Facebook groups. They didn't exist when I started. Instagram didn't exist. Podcasting has been around for ages, but it's really only now getting really exciting for small business people to do. Email marketing, obviously hugely powerful. Video, all of us are able to have our own TV channel and publish our own content. Imagine that 20 years ago that you could actually make videos and put them out there. LinkedIn is getting huge. It's actually my favourite social media platform at the moment. I know it's boring and full of weirdos, but there's a lot of cut through there. What the difference is about people on LinkedIn rather than Instagram, they've got money because they're business people. So post on Instagram all you like. You'll get lots of mums who don't have any money who can't afford your services and are like, well, I've only got $50. Isn't that enough to build a website? No. Blogging is one piece of the content marketing pie and it's not right for everything. So if I'm going to launch a course, I don't sit around and write 20 blog posts and publish them week after week after week. If I'm going to launch a course, I'm going to get on social media, I'm going to do excerpts, testimonials, short videos, Facebook Lives, Q&As, podcasts. I'm going to get my name out there. I'm not going to blog because blogging is a slow burn. I have 280 blogs on my website. It took me a long time to write them. But the other fact about putting content out there on your website is that it lasts forever. It's still there. So posts that I wrote in 2009 were consistently delivering traffic to my site years later. And not just traffic, but traffic that converts. But for many of you, you are not getting your blogs read. You're looking at your statistics on Google going, wow, 10 people looked at that blog last month. That's depressing. So today I'm going to give you some reasons why that's happening and some ideas of how to fix them. So the first one is you don't have a clear goal. You just believe the myth that Google wants you to publish a blog post every week. Google doesn't give a crap. Google doesn't reward consistent publishers, regular publishers. It doesn't even reward new content. Google rewards the best content. So there is a tiny part of the algorithm called QDF, which is query deserves freshness. But that only applies to content that needs to be fresh. So who here watches The Bachelor? Put your hand up, Nick. I know you do. He's watching it now on his phone. If I'm doing an article about The Bachelor, I don't want to search on Google and find a post about last year's Bachelor. I want to know about this year's Bachelor. So for that instance, Google will seek out content that's fresh. But if I'm writing a blog post about how to write a press release, how to write a press release hasn't really changed for the last five years. So it's not going to pick the newest post. It's going to pick the most comprehensive, research-extensive, linked-to, socially-popular post. So never post just because you think you ought to, just because you want to feed the Google Beast. The Google Beast will wait for better content. So what are valuable and valid reasons to publish blogs? Well, the first one is called Eat. Does anyone know what this means? Expertise, authority and trust. Now this is important from a commercial point of view, from a buying point of view. If you are the expert in your field, if you are the authority, if people trust you, they're more likely to buy from you. But it's actually increasingly part of Google's algorithm. Now unlike lots of the other things that have been talked about today, like Tony's presentation, for example, three seconds speed, crawlability, responsiveness, all that stuff, it's very easy. It's very black and white, isn't it? Either your site's three seconds or it's 27. How on earth do you manage that expertise, authority and trust? It's a bit more abstract in ethereal. Well, Google looks for signals. It looks for what you're writing about, what you're talking about. So if it consistently sees the name Katie Tilden and copywriting, over time it's going to understand that Katie Tilden is a copywriter. If she starts to talk about a particular type of copywriting, it's going to make that association again. Google is building up a digital footprint for all of us, which is why it's so good at knowing what we're thinking in the middle of the night. So eat is really important. I'm going to talk a bit more about eat in a second. The next thing blog posting allows us to do is solve customer problems. So I don't sit there waiting for someone's blog to come out. It's really looking forward to reading that blog post today and it's not come out. Where is their email? No, if I have a problem I go onto Google, I search for something and I read a blog and if that blog solves my problem really well and I really enjoy that content, maybe I'll sign up to their newsletter or follow their social media. Maybe I'll recommend that article to someone else or do what everyone does. Save the blog in a folder on my desktop and then save more and more articles there until the folder gets really big and depressing and then I delete it because I'm never going to read them all. And then I make another folder and start it all over again. But if someone solves my problem, I already like them. I'm already warming up to them. They've helped me. I'm going to remember that even if it was only in written format. Next thing it enables to do is sell without selling. Who here feels like they are a natural sales person? Anybody? Okay, Nick of course. It's hard to sell. Most of us feel a bit icky about it. We feel it's a bit American. If someone had a disease and you have the cure, then all you're doing is explaining it to them. We'll talk about some sales ideas earlier about really making things targeted and really identifying what people's issues are. But blogging allows us to more subtly sell. You know, we're helping someone solve a problem, but we're also talking about why we are awesome at what we do. And then at the end, you know, we talked about giving out our information and helping people and some people are like, well, I don't want to tell people what I do because then they won't hire me. Believe me, they will because often I read that blog post that says the best way to improve your site speed is to do this, this, this, this. And I'm like, great. I don't want to do any of that. Can you do it for me? Hurt me, Hurt. Dwi'n arwineb yn cael ei fod yn cwysylltwll yn rhan o'i ddechrau i'w bwyr yn y galling. Nid oedd yn bethau a'i dynnu ond i'w erioed. Felly aww, gyda, i'w ddechrau i ddechrau i'w ddod i'w ddiweddio'n symud ymlaen i ddechrau oherwydd iawn i'w ddod o'r cychaf yn yma'r tîm. Felly ond o'i ddod o ddod o'i ddod o'i ddod o'i ddod i'w ddod o'u ddod i ddod roi'n gweithio'n gweithio'n Gwgol. A mae'r byn ei gael yn ei gweithio'n gweithio. Mae'n gweithio cais plodol, â gweithio, ondwn ni'n gweithio'r 5-page website, a'r 20-page website, ond yw'r Pwysig wedi gweithio. ac mae'n gweithio'n gweithio. Y dweud y gweithio'n gweithio yma yw'r trafiad. Mae'n gweithio'n gweithio'n gweithio. Mae'r ddweithio gyda'n gweithio'n gweithio. Mae'r organic seit, ganwétr, oeddych o siarad am ychydig o blaen, yw 1,000 ysgol. Maen nhw'n gymryd adread, yw gwirionedd yn adread yma, yn ymddangos. Rwyf yn wedi bod nhw'n rhoi'n gwirioneddon yma o uncredig fibygwyr, ac efallai rai'n arweithio arwain'u gwirionedd. Oedd yn y prynsibl. Y rwy'r trafyt yn dwyw'r content mae'ró sydd yma ar remaining o'r modd yma ar y site pa ten maen nhw. Maen nhw'n rhaid i'r 1,000 ysgufyd sy'n gweithio ddechrau, â fwy o gwrs cynghweithio â'r tyflau'r rhaniau, i'r Feligedd cyfhwyco, n Aliadau i chi'n gwneud i'r hynny. Byddwn ni'n wedi'i gyflaen i'r hyn sydd y tlifio, ddweud cyflaen i chi'r ddweud i chi yw'r gwaith. Fe hwnne scwrs o gerdyn nhw. Fe hwnne gallw sy'n golygu i chi'ch y tro cyflaen, i chi'ch ddweud i chi'r gwneud i chi o'i chyfwysion. Felly, rydw i'n ddweud o ddweud y bydwch yn ddweud o'r golygu. Felly, rydw i'n ddweud o'r gyllid, rydw i'n ddweud o golygu? Rydw i'n ddweud i'r ddweud o'r eisteddol i Lottery? Yn y gwybod y cerddor, yr ysgol yw'r blog yn ymgyrch yn ei fod yn fwy i'r ysgol wrth i ddweud y ddweud o'r ddweud o ddweud i'r ddweud i'r ddweud o ddweud. executives and trust, here are some little tips on how you can do that. We want Google to think you are the expert in your field, how do we make Google do that. The first thing you can do is write a really strong about us page. You don't need the us by the way, don't need the pronoun, it's your website, who else is this going to be about? This is boopers. They need a good copywriter. But on your about us page, the about us page isn't really about you. It's about what you don't have when you're doing it. i'w cwrwb am gynnwys i ddechrau. Felly mae'r pageau i'n gweithio'r pwysig o gweithio'r ddechrau, gyda chi'n gweithio'r ddweud, gyda'r ymgeithio, ymgyrchai, mae'r allwchau gwaith, mae'n gweithio'r enghraen, ond mae'r ddisgrifiadau yma, mae'n gweithio'r ddweud i fynd. Rwy'n ei chael cyffredinol sy'n cyfrannu ddweud sy'n cyfrannu gweld. Rwy'n gweithio'r ddweud. Ac mae'r cydwyddaeth nesaf arall wrth bod y cyfnod o'r cydwyddiadau ac mae'r gyfnod o'r cydwyddiadau i'r dda. Dwi'n bwysig cyntaf i'r cydwyddiadau. Ond yna, mae at y gwrth, rwy'n golygu diolch yn cymryd, ac mae'n cyfnod o'r cydwyddiadau. Ac mae'n gweithio bod nhw'n gweithio'n gweithio. Mae'r cydwyddiadau arall y website, mae'n gyfrifiadau. Mae'n gweithio bod nhw'n gwybod i ddylu gyda'w cysylltau cysylltau sy'n gweithio. Mae'r ystafell wedi bod y cyhoedd yw'n gweithio i'r gweithio. Ond o'n ddifen nhw'n gweithio y gweithio, mae'n ddiddordeb ar y ddechrau mewn cyfrannu'r cyfrannu. Yn cael ei fod yn i gwneud y plesio y maen nhw, ond, ond, mae'r cyfrannu gweithio, mae'n gwneud i'n gweithio, ond rydyn ni wedi gwneud i'n gweithio. Rydyn ni wedi gwneud i chi. Rydyn ni wedi gwneud i chi. Fy gyd, cymdeithasol isiol ymweld y cyfnod o'ch cyfnod y cyfnod yma ymddylo'n gor笑 o'r bai. G�� unrhyw hetfyn o gyngh gezw. Cymru, gallwch gyffredinau Cymru. A mae, dwi'n gweithio, un oedd ymddangos i gael cyfnod y cyfnod ond rydym iddi. Dyna'r bai gyfle ffordd o 50-wyrd, ddim yn geisio'r bai i dynebu. Am ff beth mae'n gofynol iawn. Mae yw grweithio a'r parbyn nhw mae'n ychydig o'r parbyn nhw.speaking something fun in there as well. That bio is going to be seen again and again, it's going to be on multiple articles. And Google's going to build up that digital footprint. Social signals are important. There's a big debate about how much social influence is ranking. But clearly social has other benefits. It builds your brand, it builds connections. So I don't think, as a professional work oppress visibility a really a professional anything in digital marketing. Rwyf ni'n gweithio i'r cyd-farnodd. Mae'n gweithio i'r Facebook. Mae'r cyd-farnodd, yn ymddangos, ond dyna'n dda chi'n gweld felly yr ydych chi'n gweld cyfnodd. Mae'r cyfnodd yn ymdyn nhw'n ei ddweud. Fyddai llunio'r cyllid yn gwneud hynny. Felly mae'r cyd-farnodd yn ymddangos. Felly mae'r cyfnodd yn fwyaf. Mae'r cyd-farnodd yn ymwinell yma. Mae'r cyd-farnodd yn ymddangos, my business. We should all have a Google My Business profile. I mean, come on. It's free. It's free real estate from Google. You can now publish posts on it, products, offers. You can get reviews. Reviews so powerful. They don't influence ranking, but they influence click-through rate. And it's free real estate. You don't have to publish your real address on there. And you have a chance of getting in the local pack in your local area. And if you're in the local pack, you're going to get the clicks. Another thing you can do is hire really amazing writers. So, look, if you are not the best blog post writer, or you're writing about a particular discipline, hire someone to do it for you. Get some decent cornerstone solid articles on your blog post. So, when people come to your site, it's really clear that you know what you're doing. Obviously, you don't tell them you've got a copywriter to write them. You pretend you wrote them yourself. But if you are not confident, write something, get an editor or a copywriter to read over it for you. I'm not a great WordPress developer. I have other people to help me with that. You don't have to do it all your own, and it's a good investment. The other thing, of course, to do is build up your reputation with Google and online by getting reviews and testimonials. It's something I would say to you every week. Put an hour in your diary to go out to some previous clients and just say, please review me. And don't get them to email you that review. Get them to put it on a social site. You want it on LinkedIn. You want it on Google My Business. You want it on Facebook. You want that social proof. And then you cut and paste it and pop it on your own site. So that's eat. Building up your Google's picture of you as an expert. The next thing is you don't understand your audience. And we all think we do. You know, we've all heard of demographic studies. This is Clive. Clive is 49. He drives a Land Rover. He's married to Susan. They have 2.7 children and a dog called Bernard. You know, but really, if we know that demographic information about Clive, we don't know how Clive really feels. We don't know anything about Clive. We've created this really crappy avatar of a fake human. So the method I like to use is called BDF. It's a really simple acronym to just explain how to dig a bit deeper into our customers' problems. So what it stands for is understanding someone's preconceived beliefs, deepest desires and darkest fears. So I'm going to pick a volunteer from the audience. I'm picking you because you made eye contact. What do you do for a living? Okay, so what would be someone's preconceived belief about a bookkeeper? And I've met you and you are really boring, aren't you? Preconceived beliefs will be maybe that you're boring, that you're a numbers person, you're maybe not a great communicator. What's the deepest desire when you hire a bookkeeper that you never have to do that stuff again? And it's all going to be done seamlessly and perfectly. The darkest fear is that it won't be that you're going to mess up or that you're going to be expensive. I mean, that's a fear with hiring any service provider. So we need to address these fears in our blog posts. Ten reasons why you need to hire a bookkeeper. Pretty cheesy or why I'm a communicative bookkeeper. There's ways of doing it, affordable bookkeeping ways and giving people ways of doing things for free themselves so that you show that you're a generous giving person. The classic one is lawyers. You know, we all think lawyers are going to talk in legalese, they're going to overcharge us, they're going to bamboozle us. So if lawyers write blog posts that counter those fears and feed those desires and break down those preconceived beliefs, then they're going to win more customers. But the other acronym I like to use is the CGF. And this is, I have forgotten what it is again. I went blank the other day, Clive Googling Fear. So this is back to Clive. We need to get into the kind of searches that Clive does at 2am in the morning when he wakes up and finds a rash and he's going. What is he typing into Google? Anybody in this room, if I take your laptop and look at your Google search history, I would find some dark...could someone volunteer? If there's one thing you do, soon as you start a relationship with anybody you learn how to clear your Google search history. It's very important if you want to find out how I'll show you after the session. But those kind of searches are the ones that really hit home. If I can be the person that tells Clive what the rash in his groin is and get rid of his fear and let Clive sleep a little bit better, he's going to remember me. And next time he gets that rash he's coming back to buy my ointment. I don't sell ointment for rashes, so sorry Nick. Next thing that people get wrong a lot is they don't understand search intent. So Google is all about search intent. There was an algorithm update called Hummingbird which was about understanding that when someone types certain words into Google they mean things. Google used to be very good at understanding what we're searching for. Now it's good at understanding why we're searching for it. So the example I always use is Piglet Jumpers. It's a terrible example. I'm as sick of it as you are. But if someone types Piglet Jumpers into Google, what do they want? What do they want, sir? Oh, he didn't hear what I said. I thought I said it quite loud. What would someone who types Piglet Jumpers into Google want? A jumper for Piglet. Do they want a jumper for their Piglet or a jumper with a Piglet on it? Do they actually want a jumper or do they want to see pictures of jumpers? Do they want to see little piggies in jumpers running around on YouTube videos? We don't know. But as soon as someone puts buy in front of that word, we know they have transaction intent. As soon as someone puts how to make in front of that keyword, we know they have informational intent. So it's the words around our keywords that help Google deliver the right content. You type Piglet Jumpers into Google, you'll get pictures and you'll get videos. You type buy, you'll get shops straight away. So it's really important. So there are four types of searcher intent. You could possibly say there's a fifth, which is location intent, transactional, informational, investigational and navigational. So transactional is pretty obvious, buy. Informational is I want to answer a question, I want to know something. I have a question I need an answer. Investigational is comparison. I'm thinking about buying this or this, which is better. Things like vice versa versa, reviews, testimonials. And navigational is just I want to get somewhere on the interwebs. I want to get to net banks login page. So you don't want to rank for that unless you literally are a net banks login page. So when we are thinking in blogging terms, we are purely in informational and investigational. We are answering questions, we are helping, we are providing information. We're not about navigation and we're not about transactions. Save all that kind of stuff for your e-commerce pages and your sales pages. So somebody earlier today talked about the funnel. The funnel starts with tofu, then mofu, not mofo, then bofu. Top of funnel, middle of funnel, bottom of funnel. We are all in the top of funnel when we're blogging. These are people who want what we do, but they don't know that we do it. They are probably problem aware, but they're maybe not even solution aware. They are not brand aware. So someone who wants what you specifically will type your brand into Google. Somebody wants the product that you sell because they've heard of it will type that into Google. So for me it would be like if someone had heard of my course, they'd type in the recipe for SEO success or Kate Toon's SEO course. If they'd heard of the course, they might type in SEO nibbles or 10 day challenge. But if they're just problem aware, they might type in, why does Google not like my website? And if I've got a post that answers that, I'm starting to get them in my funnel. They're tofu, they sign up to my newsletter, they're in my funnel, they can't escape. So we are in tofu land. So don't try and do the hard sell at this point. It's like networking event where someone rushes up with their business card. You just introduce yourself first. The next thing is that people don't do any keyword research. Who does a couple of hours of comprehensive keyword research every time they write a blog post? Anyone? You're a weirdo. I don't even do it. So I recommend that keyword research is something that you do in batches. You do a lot of big, some deep keyword research and that should last you two or three months. You should get enough intelligence out of that to generate enough keywords for your pages and your products and some blog posts. So it's not something you have to do every single time. So when it comes to keyword research, the first step is the brainstorm. I'll use the bookkeeping example. You may be wanting to talk about baths coming up or you want to talk about zero or why zero is better than MYOB. So the first thing you're going to do is you're going to write down zero, MYOB, why is it better, vice versa. You're going to write anything that comes into your head. Comparison, example. You're just going to blurt it all out. No idea is a bad idea. And then you can use tools like this. So these are heaps of tools that you can use to take those keywords that you've got and drop them in and see what generates. Because these short keywords, these head keywords, these one word keywords, we're never going to rank for them. We need long tail keywords. Keywords that are four or five or six phrases long. All of these are free, apart from SEMrush, and SEMrush has the best data, so, you know. But for most of us, a great tool that we can use for blogging is answer the public. So if you put in like a zero into answer the public, it will tell you all the questions people have asked about zero on the internet. Why is zero so expensive? Is zero the best solution for small business? Is zero better than MYOB? Great. I've got a nice little title for my blog post now. So we can use... My other really good one is keyword shitter. Sorry. It generates just thousands and thousands of keywords. It's really great. Most of them are insane, but sometimes you find a gem. So once we have found our keywords, what are we looking for? We're trying to find keywords that have high traffic and low competition. And we also want to have keywords that have the right intent. So for blogging, we don't want to go after keywords that have the words buy or affordable because that's the wrong intent. We're in an information world. We're in an investigation world. So we can use... This is SEMrush. You can see here at the top, if I can point it out, it tells you the traffic that the keyword's getting and then you can see the volume, the keyword difficulty, the cost per click is if you were to buy it. Because if you were to pay for some of these keywords, if you're paying $15 a click, just a click. And I haven't got that kind of money. So you can use tools like SEMrush to find out what keywords you're already ranking for, what content's already doing well. Maybe all you need to do is tweak content you've already got. Maybe you don't need to write a new blog post. Maybe you need to improve a blog post you already have written or combine a few old crappy ones into one new good one. So you can use tools like that. Obviously a great thing to do as well is to look at your competitor keywords, pop their URL, what are they ranking for? Is there another bookkeeper in your area that's written a great blog post? Do you're not going to steal, but you're going to be inspired by and you're going to do a better job of it. It's called skyscrapering. So you take their blog post and they've written 500 words. You write 2000 words and have a checklist in it in a video. You do a better job of that blog post. You can also use Google Search Console, Google Search Console. All the keyword data that was in Google AdWords that we can't get at as easily is now in Google Search Console. So we can see what we're ranking for. We can see the volume it's generating and the cost per click. So, you know, I'm not expecting to explain the whole world of keyword research to you in five minutes, but it's something to think about. Even a choice between this keyword and this keyword that's just slightly different volumes can make huge differences to how your blog ranks and how many visitors you get and therefore how much traffic you get and how many conversions you get. Once you've done that, you need to group things together. So one thing that people really misunderstand about keywords is they think they need to have every keyword they can think of. They need to have a piece of content for it. No, you don't do that. What you do is you think about the searcher intent. So if you come up with like myob versus zero and then which is better, myob or zero, would you do two separate blogs about those, so different keywords? No, you wouldn't because the searcher intent is the same. Someone who is happy with that keyword would be happy with the same article. So you're generally trying to find a focus keyword which is going to be the one that is the best and then synonyms, other phrases that are similar. So keyword research is a bit of a rabbit hole. Even if all you try to do is when you write your next blog post just think what would someone type into Google to find this blog post. But even if that's all you do, you're doing more than most people are doing. So the next place where people fail is readability. So the average readability age in Australia, what does anyone think it is? Grades year what? Four, it's seven. So it's seven, grades seven. And yet a lot of the blog post that I put through this tool, I'll come back to it, this one here, Hemingway, which is a free tool online, the readability age that you need to have is graduate level. And that's not because you're writing a super urgent copy, it's because you're writing really badly. You have long sentences, complex sentences. You've used semi-colons. No one knows how to use a semi-colon. Not even me and I get paid money to be a copywriter. Use full stops, shorter sentences. You've used the passive voice rather than the active voice. We don't know we're doing it. We all think we can write, but we can't. And this tool will tell you all the mistakes that you've made. And the other thing to remember, and this is a slide I jumped past, is that very few people are going to read from the start of your blog post to the end. They're going to jump around looking for subheaders and bits that they want to read. How many of us do you scan the post? You find the little bit you read, or you go to the bottom where it says, are, too long didn't read, and you read the five bullet points that sum up the whole blog post. So make it easy for people to forage. Don't make me come to your site and see a big blob of copy that looks so intimidating. I'm just going to click away to someone else who's broken that copy up and made it more readable. So the next problem that I find a lot with blog posts is that you don't consider structure. And from this point I'm talking about writing structure. So at school, most of us were told when we write something you need to have a beginning, middle, and end. This is like a ham sandwich, bread, ham, bread. Now with a blog post it looks more like this. It's like bread, ham, salad, more bread, another patty, cheese, whatever. Because blog posts should go on and on and I'm going to talk about length at the end. So you have a beginning, middle and end. What you do when you're writing a blog post is you need to very quickly tell people what they're going to get from reading this blog post. One thing you can do as well is there's a little plug-in in WordPress that will calculate the reading time for your blog post. So use that. It's really great. I can't remember. Probably something like WP reading time. Because they're all so imaginative. But I'll try and remember and I'll tweet it later or share it on Instagram. But what you need to do is at the beginning of the article, say, in this article I'm going to tell you this. And by the end of the article you will be able to do this. Understand this problem, under whatever. So you tell them what you're going to do. You say what you're going to say. Then you say it. And at the end you say, this is what I told you. You sum it back up again. So many blog posts I read just kind of go, and they just stop. And there's no conclusion. It's like, oh, we're done? Okay, all right. You need to finish what you've started and reiterate the points that you've made or the one point. So I often finish a blog post saying, so if there's one thing you take from this article, remember blah. And then they take one thing from your article and they remember it. So you need to do a good intro paragraph. You need to do short paragraphs. So 50 to 60 words, 100 words, no longer. And then every paragraph have a subheader or every two paragraphs that says what the next paragraph's about so that I can scan the whole article and maybe just read two or three. It doesn't matter. As long as I get my problem solved, use quotes to break up the content just to make it easier to read and digest. Use images, try to move the eye from the left to the right and the right to the left so move the images around on the page. Link to reputable sources like link out, obviously, in a new window. Have a conclusion and then ask a question. You want comments. Comments are free copy, free Google friendly copy, saturated with Google keywords that you didn't have to write. Most people will read the comments often before they read the article. If you use heat map studies, especially if it's a controversial topic, they'll go straight to the bottom and read the fighting at the bottom. And comments also give you an opportunity to have a relationship with your readers. I really hated this article. I thought it was really badly written and you wasted six minutes of my life. I'm sorry Clive, I'm sorry that you feel that way. At least you get to have a chat with Clive and maybe you win Clive over and he remembers you. The next question is do you have a good reaction? Have a bit of a giggle, which is important. So consider structure. The best blog posts are wiggly. They go in and out and in and out. Long sentences, short sentences, images, quotes, subheaders. If your post doesn't wiggle, something has gone wrong. If it's block, block, block, I'm clicking off to someone else's site. The next reason is you don't consider layout. Now we have Gutenberg. I try to use it with Divi, I don't use Divi for my blogs either, I just can't code them, let's not get into it, you hate Divi, we're not going to have that fight again. Whatever you do, whether you use, whatever thing you use, just try to think about breaking up your content with white space, give the eye a rest, so don't just have chunk, chunk, chunk. Use bullet points wherever you can, every time you get to a list, bullet it out, makes it really easy to read, especially if your audience is male. If I ever want my partner to do anything, I put it in bullet points. If I try and write a full sentence, this is what's the point of sending that email. He's never going to understand it. Short paragraphs, keep them short, people have slow attention spans, they struggle, I struggle. People don't read online like they read books. Have them wiggle and remember, I'm never to fully justify copy. You know how books are this wide? It's because the eye cannot connect to the next line if you go any wider than that. At 16 words, then the eye loses its place on the page. Same happens with web, which is why a lot of blogs have a sidebar down the side. Just makes it easier to have that padding on either side, makes the content easier to connect and connect. That's white space if you don't know what it is, because I feel like lots of developers don't know what white space is. Lots of designers use white space too much, but there we go. The next thing is you don't write like a human. For some reason, those of us who aren't confident writers, when we start writing blog posts, we start getting into this really weird, formal way of writing, let's lose lots of long words. No, you are having a conversation with one reader. Thank you. With one reader. That's the other thing as well. Never talk about our customers. Always talk about you. There is one pair of eyeballs reading that article at a time, so talk directly to the person. You need to write like a human. How do humans talk? We don't say it is a lovely day today. We say it's a lovely day. We don't say we will be going to the pub later for beer. We say we'll be going to the pub later for beer. We contract our words. We don't use cliches and overly used idioms. If you're worried that you're a cliched writer, there's a great little tool called cliché finder. You can pop your copy in and it will find all your cliches. We use customer language because if people are typing stuff into Google, Google is pretty good, but it can't always make the connection. The example I've used ad nauseam, but I'll use it again, is when I used to write content for Randwick Council and they wanted the red lid bin page. I can never say it, red lid bin. Try saying that later on tonight. They wanted it called the garbage receptacle collection units because that's what we call them in council. That's what Barry calls them. Barry was the head of refuse and he was determined. We had three meetings, which I was paid for, so I didn't mind about whether they were red bins or red lid bins. Put your hand up if you say red bin. Put your hand up if you say red lid bin. The red bin people, you're all wrong. The bin isn't red. The lid is red. Use customer language. Use the terms that people use. There's lots of word press developers in the room. Words that you use every day mean nothing to us. Caching. Caching. What does that mean? Are you throwing it out there? We're all supposed to understand what it means. We don't. Backups. Of course I don't know what a backup is. I'm an accountant. Of course I know what that means. We don't know what you're talking about. The same if you're an accountant and you basically talk about anything because I don't understand anything my accountant says. Be playful as well. Don't be afraid of having a bit of a personality. Personalities aren't, you know, something negative to have in business. They're actually quite a good thing to have a personality. And yes, you won't be everybody's cup of tea, but you'll be someone's cup of tea. You know, it's the whole vanilla ice cream. Who likes vanilla ice cream? You're weird. You know, you probably like vanilla ice cream, but you're fetishy mad about cookie dough with this and blah, blah, blah. You know, no one wants to be vanilla. So be playful. Now here's some great little lines that you can use to break up your content. You know how I said chunk, chunk, chunk? Well this is a great way of breaking up the content. So you said something and then you're about to talk about something else and you go, okay let's get stuck in. You know, I'm going to talk to you about ten wordpress plug-ins that are really amazing. Okay, let's get stuck in. Here's the deal. My top plug-in is this one and it does this and this. Exciting, right? And it gets better. It also does this and this. And yes, it might sound a bit cheesy and I might take your way. You'd have to use all of them, but just try to use some little chatty phrases. And again, you're going to get that wiggle, aren't you? Because you're going to have short phrase, long phrase, short phrase, long phrase. The next thing is your headlines suck. Especially wordpress bloggers. God, boring headlines. So there are basically six different ways to write a headline. There's probably more, but I've decided there are six so we'll all agree with me. The first one is a statement. It's not very inviting. It's kind of overconfident. It doesn't really work. The next one is question. Is there an easier way to bathe piglets? Who doesn't want to read that article? I want to read it right now. The next one is how to. This is the solving customer problems. I've got a piglet. I'm finding it really difficult to bathe it. How can I make piglets? That's something Clive is typing in at 2am. 30 ways to bathe piglets. Now that's an article that you're going to want to keep. You're going to want a bookmark. You're going to want to save it. But what's equally powerful is the number one way to bathe piglets. That's really powerful because that's achievable. My top three. I can. I can do three things. Three ways to bathe piglets you need to know today. Seven is really good as well. Seven works. Obviously top tens if they actually are a top ten. 172 ways to bathe piglets. Great, comprehensive. I'm going to download it. It's going in the folder and then the folder is getting deleted. I'm never reading that article. I don't know if you read anything by Brian Dean or Neil Patel, but it's so long. I'm like, this is great, guys, and I can't get through it. So I'll maybe read one paragraph and then I move away. Read or addressing, that's kind of urgency and then emotional. Tell a story, bathing piglets, how I made it in my life easier. My story, something personal, every article you think of has already been written. The only thing that you bring to it is your personal experience. I've only got five minutes. I'm going to have to sort of dead fast. You can take screen grabs of the photos of these and get social media stuff if you share them. Headline generator tools, portent tools. It's really good title maker. Take a photo. Quick, I'm moving on. I've got a sign from Nick. I'm going to go over time. I don't care. Tweak your biz. This one's fun as well. Title generator. I will share some of these on social. Blog ideas generator has a weird fixation with Miley Cyrus. So whatever you put in, it will be like, how Miley Cyrus taught me to bathe my piglet easier. It's like, well, okay. But it's fun anyway. So use those. Now obviously we're getting to the SEO bit. You don't optimize for the Google Beast. Now this isn't actually that hard. You should always write for humans first and Google second. We know that. We know that. Remember we chose our focus keyword earlier, the phrase that we really wanted to rank for and then we came up with some synonyms that we might use as well. When we have our focus keyword on a little pink post-it note on our screen, we've written our wonderful article. It's chatty. It's wiggly. It's great. Then all we need to do is not overuse that word. We don't keyword stuff. It doesn't work anymore. It never did. And it also offends the reader. We can all tell when an article has been written for Google. So these are the only places you need to use your keyword. The title tag is the number one. Front end your title tag. So if your keyword that you've chosen is myb or zero which is better, that's your title tag. You don't need to put your brand in because at this point no one cares about your brand. If they wanted to find your brand, they'd be typing your brand into Google. So just have that. Never sacrifice space in your title tag for your brand. Use it in your URL, how to, sorry, myb, hyphen, brismen, hyphen, well, well. Use it in your meta description but be aware that that's not used for ranking. Your meta description is an ad to make people click through. Your alt tag, your sub headers, your H1, your first 100 words, your image file name, and then you stop. You don't have to use it any more than that. You're going to use your synonyms. The next big thing that I think I'm going to do a quick test and I might go five minutes over but there's nothing you can do about it. Everyone's trapped in the room. I'm going to keep talking. You have to drag me off. Does anyone have an iPhone? I'm going to try something embarrassing now. You're here, you were late. Can you put your phone and talk to Siri? And can you say, hey Siri, who's the best? You don't, okay. Does anyone understand how to use their iPhone? Anyone? Anyone? Yeah, okay. Can you ask Siri, hey Siri, who's the best copywriter in Sydney? Come on, if it's not me, this is going to be really embarrassing. Yeah, it is me, James. It's Kate Toon. That's me, I hope. James, you really, oh, don't come to my presentations. So these days more and more people are talking to devices, hopefully just their phones and their Google homes and not their fridges and their vacuums, but we get lonely. It's all understandable. So we're talking to our devices and that changes the way that we search because if we type, we tend to type things like best pizza restaurant, Sydney, where. Whereas if we talk, we ask questions. So Google says that 70% of the requests for Google assistance are expressed in natural language. So we need to use that natural language in our posts. If the question is, what is this rash in my groin? Our blog title is, what is this rash in your groin? Yeah? Because then the dots can be connected. So when we're writing blog posts, we really want to be focusing on the what, the when, the who, the where, the why, the how. Yeah? How do I do this? How do I speed up my website? How do I be a better bookkeeper? How do I write better copy, whatever it may be? These are the kinds of questions. This is Google. This is Clive again. The questions that people ask voice search are conversational. They're generally first person and they want to solve an immediate problem. And if you can solve that problem, you get the eats. You get the expertise, the authority and the trust. That is something I've typed in very many times, by the way. I'm not going to tell you which one. The next thing is you don't understand featured snippets. So featured snippets look at something like this. They come up at the top of the search results now. They're seeing them more and more. We can get different types of them, but they are basically Google's choice. You only get them if you're on the first page, but you can be in position 10 and still get a featured snippet, which essentially means you're positioned zero. Above the ads, above the local pack, you're getting all the love, all the click, all the brand awareness. So featured snippets are happening because Google is becoming an answer engine. It's not a search engine anymore. Something like 10% of the search results now generate results. Google is skimming all our sites, which I promised it would never do, and publishing the content without attribution. Thanks, Google, but we can't get out now. We're all in. We're never going to use DuckDuckGo. Give up on it. So there's different types of featured snippets. There are lists, paragraphs, videos, and then straightforward answers. We're really going after the paragraphs. You want to be the person that, when someone types in how much does a copyrighter charge, that you're the first result, and you're going to hope that the answer is good enough that they then click through. But even if they don't, it's still you've been judged by Google to be the expert, and that goes in subliminally, and people remember. So featured snippets, if you want to get a featured snippet, write a 50-word, a short version of your blog post at the top, and then go on to write a longer version. Give Google the 50 words that they can cut and they can steal from you. Give it to them in a nice format. Finally, and we're nearly there, promise, you don't have the secret sauce. Now, I teach SEO, and I would love to say that on my course I teach some magic trick that no one else in this room knows. I don't. Courses are generally just someone else's gone to the effort of gathering all the information, working out what's priority, breaking it down for you in a way that you can understand. There is no secret sauce. You can be a great writer, you can be a funny writer, you can give the best, most intelligent article in the world, and it still won't perform. And so sometimes it does feel a bit frustrating, but sometimes you hit gold, and generally I find you hit gold when you do follow all this stuff, you really understand your customers, you have some personality, tone of voice, you use all those stylistic elements I've talked about. And I had one post. This is the last blog post I wrote. So January 2018, it's quite a while ago, and it was called 19 Things Not To Do In A Facebook Group, and that has now had over 200,000 people read it, and 12,000 shares, which for me is a small business owner. I'm not a big famous person. That's really, really great. So if you want to check out an example of everything I've talked about today, for me that's my, someone said, what's a great example of a WordPress site? For me that's an example of my best blog post. And so if you want to check that out, you can go and check that out after this. So I've finished now. If you did share stuff on social media, come and see me at the end. If you want to learn more about SEO or copywriting or blogging, join my group on Facebook. It's called I Love SEO. It's lots of fun. I also have a free course that you can all sign up to. It's called SEO Nibbles. Just type SEO Nibbles into Google and you'll find it. Not SEO Nipples. Although I do repeatedly say SEO Nipples in the video by accident, and I didn't know sit until I'd already published it. So I left it in. So you get a prize every time you notice it. And that's it. Me done. Sorry I went over.